Content transcoding is widely used in content delivery applications, such as video streaming applications, which can include video-on-demand, Cable television (TV) programming, live TV over the internet, accessing content by way of social media providers, etc. Content delivery applications often facilitate access to the same body of content but with different formats, compression ratios, frame dimensions, etc. As an example, watching a video program on a desktop computer will often be at a higher bitrate, larger frame size, and better resolution than watching the same video program on a mobile phone. In these types of situations, frequently, a high quality video stream is recorded and stored at a server. The high quality video stream then can be adapted to the output bit rates, temporal/spatial resolutions and video formats for delivery to different terminal devices and over different channels or carrier services. In transcoding, both accurate bit rate and a consistent visual quality are generally desirable.